


Wishbone

by Comatosejoy



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, The Iliad - Homer, The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - 1970s, Alternate Universe - Vietnam, Blow Jobs, Canon-Typical Violence, Hand Jobs, M/M, POV Third Person, Romance, Suicide Attempt, Vietnam War, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:14:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 20,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25227382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Comatosejoy/pseuds/Comatosejoy
Summary: "War did not kill Pelides men, it made them."Vietnam War AU.
Relationships: Achilles/Patroclus (Song of Achilles)
Comments: 62
Kudos: 98





	1. Cherries

His driver’s license said Achilles Pelides, which was the anglicanized version of his name. Achilles already sounded too foreign, though, so he shortened it to Leo when he was five and his parents divorced and his mom moved back to Greece. Since then his dad had married again. A younger, petite former waitress with blonde hair and an All-American look that was good for his burgeoning political career. She kissed Mr. Pelides on the cheek next to little Leo in the family portrait. Didn’t matter that they were only ten years apart in age. Leo didn’t call her mom, and the woman didn’t call him son. He wasn’t bitter. His mom was happier now, anyway. 

His dad had served in the war. Had stories of killing Nazis and smoking Lucky Strikes. Leo figured that some of it was true, some false. He’d heard it said that vets who really saw shit kept their mouths shut on account of the shell shock.

His grandfather had served in the war before that, killing the fathers of the Germans that his dad killed, maybe. And his grandfather’s father fought for the North in the Civil War. War did not kill Pelides men, it made them. 

Leo didn’t pay attention to politics, much. Not a lot of teenage boys did where he was from, and he was more concerned about playing football and playing guitar and chasing girls ( _chasing_ being the keyword, because he lost interest the moment they were caught). 

There was the odd kid from his high school who’d hitchhike south to San Francisco--it’d take all day if they were lucky and got rides clean down the I-5--but they were few and far between. He’d hear about them protesting the war and smoking dope and dropping acid and fucking whatever moved. That shit didn’t appeal to him, nor did it feel real. In Phthia, Washington, the hippies, the druggies, the girls burning their bras and the boys dropping out may as well have been on Mars.

And if Leo were really honest, he’d say he was worried about the war in Vietnam ending before he had a chance to enlist. He was terrified he’d be the first man in his family not to go to war. He imagined himself, a 45-year-old, with a job that he had to wear a suit and tie for, with a wife and kids, and a father who still called him “boy” because he never had the pleasure of gutting someone with a bayonet or whatever it was his father had actually done. 

When he graduated high school in 1972 and signed up for the Navy, not even eighteen yet--he had a late birthday, which he would celebrate that year at bootcamp--people told him he was fucking crazy. The Americans were the bad guys, that was obvious at this point, and he’d been lucky to be one year too young for the draft. He was rich, too, and could go to college easily.

But his dad had been pleased as punch. He made it the center of his campaign, it being an election year for him. His firstborn son was handsome, magnetic, the star quarterback in the fall and the star of the track team in the spring. And this talented, beautiful, perfect son had signed up for the war of his own volition like a true patriot. _Look at this fine young man I raised,_ his father would say, and Leo would smile. 

Before Leo shipped off to California where he’d start his basic training, he made it official with some girl. She was pretty and graceful. Vulpine, even. Someone his dad approved of, another politician’s kid. She was also cruel and bad at holding a conversation and he only really started dating her because it was what you did; it was part of the cliche. He imagined pulling a picture of her out and nudging a buddy somewhere in a foxhole. _Look at what I get to come home to,_ he’d say wistfully, flicking his finger over the grainy photograph of Deidamia, despite knowing that she was shrill and boring on her very best days. It wasn’t about her, so he really didn’t care when she cried the night before he left and kissed him with her annoying little mouth. She was necessary to the narrative he’d created here. He sort of looked forward to getting a Dear John letter from her a year down the line. 

He didn’t miss her, or any of his friends, or his dad, even. He didn’t know if that was normal or not; he certainly saw his bunkmates experience homesickness. All he knew, really, was how to go forward, so he didn’t look back to Phthia. He barely called, barely wrote. Lost that grainy photograph of Deidamia he’d planned to pull out amidst artillery fire. Just as well. He’d decided that he didn’t want to see her face out there anyway. 

He got stationed at Pearl Harbor after boot camp and he only told his dad in a letter and his mother in a two-minute phone call. He was optimistic, he was strong, he was brave. He was lonely.

_______________

**Sometime Before**

When Pat’s birthday was pulled out of the lottery, he didn't feel anything. How are you supposed to feel, seeing your death come out of a little blue capsule? Do you start acting like a dead man right then and there?

He looked at the ugly polyester button-up he was wearing and thought of it as a funeral shroud. He looked at the flickering of the TV in the dark room and thought of it as the flickering flames of a pyre swallowing his body and turning him to ash.

When he woke up, the morning was too bright. It was always too bright in Colorado, and Opus City was no exception. He went to the hall closet, pulled out the Smith & Wesson hidden there. It was one of maybe twenty guns around the house. This was America, this was Colorado. No household in cowboy country was complete without a few revolvers and a few rifles.

He took a hike with the gun in his hands instead of a holster. The hammer was pulled back and he was looking for a nice view to be his last. He’d planned on firing it through his heart. He didn’t know why, but the thought of the cold metal against his temple or roof of his mouth was more than he could bear.

He came to a ridge and sat. It was cold out and the air was fresh and crisp. He thought of the things he’d miss. He liked these red cliff sides, liked the hard crunch of dry snow under his boots, liked sitting still out here until the animals started wandering around, having not heard him for a while. He watched elk in the distance, a bull and two cows. There was a coyote slinking out into the sagebrush. A hawk swooping down. 

You could think Colorado austere in the wintertime. But Pat knew you just had to sit still for a few minutes. A curious chipmunk might scamper down a pine tree to get a better look at you, herd of deer jump in front of you--as startled by you as you are by them--and just as quickly disappear into the trees. 

He cheeks were freezing and he realized he’d been crying. The gun in his hands was light and he kissed the barrel. Thank God for it, thank God he doesn’t have to see his dad ever again. Thank God he doesn’t have to wade through rice paddies just to watch people die. He briefly wondered if he should have left a note. Too late now. 

He breathed in deep and pushed the muzzle of the pistol to his chest. 

And then

“Hey, Patty! Is that you?” 

he lowered the gun with a sigh of disappointment and turned his head to the voice, which he knew too well. It was the deputy’s son, Clint. Being the sheriff’s son himself, he grew up alongside Clint. Grew up getting pushed around and picked on. And Clint’s voice was suspiciously friendly. 

Pat did not answer him. Hoped he’d go on his merry way, whatever he was doing out on this trail alone. But Clint came to stand next to where Pat was seated. 

“Saw that you’re a dead man,” Clint said, cheerfully bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Your dad wasn’t too torn up about it when I saw him at the diner this morning.” 

“No, I imagine he wasn’t,” Pat said, and struggled to his feet. Clint did not help him up. “I best be on my way, now, Clint.” 

“That a shootin’ iron, Patty?” Clint said. “Doing some target practice out here?” 

“Yeah, Clint,” Pat said, though anyone could clearly see what he was really doing. There were no targets to shoot, and Pat’s eyes were red with tears. He was just taunting Pat. 

“That a .44?” Clint asked. 

“Yup,” Pat answered, continuing up the trail. 

“Lemme hold it,” Clint said, jogging up next to him. And Pat knew this routine because they had done it before. Pat had handed Clint a little 6-shooter, once. They must’ve been sixteen at the time and he remembers it had been prom night. Everyone in their class--fifteen people only--had been drinking beer illicitly after the dance. He shot at Pat’s feet, and laughed with brutish glee when Pat had yelped and jumped. He shot again and again, making Pat step high. It had been terrifying, and a girl finally told Clint to stop it already. 

“Sorry, Patty,” Clint had said innocently. “I wanted at least someone to ask you to dance tonight.” 

Clint had blown the imaginary smoke off the business end of the gun and handed it back to Pat. 

“Nah,” Pat answered. 

“You gonna make me take it?” Clint said, the friendliness dissolved from his tone. 

If Pat hadn’t heard his death sentence the day before, he might have relented. Dead men don’t have much to lose, though. 

“I guess I am,” Pat said. 

When Pat thought about that day, later, he would forget key elements and remember insignificant details. Did the gun go off because Clint punched him, and he’d accidentally squeezed the trigger? Did the gun go off because he dropped it? Was he even punched, or did that bruising happen later, as he raced down the mountain, falling over and over, to find his father? 

He remembered Clint’s face, just as shocked as his own, and Clint saying, “Oh.” 

He remembered the steam, the awful fucking steam coming out of Clints’ stomach, and the deep red dropping into the stiff, hard snow. They both sank to their knees, and Pat held his hands to Clint’s wound. Applying pressure. 

He did not remember Clint dying, but he remembered his eyes being open and unseeing and awful. He remembered throwing up, scrambling away. The gun was forgotten. 

“You’ll get manslaughter, maybe, with the trajectory as evidence,” his father had said. “What a way to get out of the war.” 

They were at the county jail, where Pat had been kept since he’d stumbled into town covered in blood and vomit and yelling that Clint had been shot. 

Pat’s eyes were wide. “You can’t think I did this on purpose.” 

“I sure do. And so does Clint’s dad. And everyone in town. But your trial’d have to be in a bigger town, and you’ll get off, and out of the war, just like you wanted.” 

“I didn’t want this,” Pat said, and he might have thrown up again if there had been anything left in his stomach. 

His father turned his back away from the bars of the cell. “We’ve decided not to give you what you want.” 

“I’m sorry?” Pat said, not sure what his father meant. 

“Clint has been reported missing. His body will not be found. This is what his family wants. They want you to go to Vietnam and get your legs blown off and guts rearranged.” 

Pat swallowed. “If I go, will it make it better? Not okay, not even. But will it redeem me, a little?” 

“No.” 

But Pat went anyway, because it was certain death and it was what Clint’s family wanted and all the guns in the house suddenly disappeared, anyway.

_______________

“Fresh meat,” Dios said. There’d been three deaths in their outfit last time they set sail. One was a motorcycle accident. It had been Pat’s friend, a guy they’d nicknamed Ajax, like the dish soap, because he was stronger than dirt. It was shit luck that Ajax had died like that. You get drafted, sure you’ll die terribly, brutally, at the hands of someone who has every goddamn right to take your life. And then you’re on leave, zooming around Olongapo on your little fucking bike while your ship reloads on supplies and someone runs a red light and BAM! You aren’t killed in action, your family can’t pretend you died honorably. You were killed by the third leading cause of death in the world. It’s like collapsing of heart failure right when the Viet Cong is about to slit your throat.

Pat was sweeping the deck. He didn’t care about the new sailors, didn’t watch them board. Making friends with someone fresh out of bootcamp was a bad investment. They called them Cherries when they were freshly brought in from the States, on account of the fact that they were virgins to killing, and a lot of them were skittish enough to get themselves killed pretty fast. Pat hadn’t been a Cherry when he’d been stationed, not really, but he’d been nervous enough to fool everyone.

_______________

One of the new kids came into the barracks right before mess and tossed his shit on a top bunk. Everyone loved a top bunk. Pat never saw the appeal; he’d take what he could get. But that particular bed already belonged to someone, and he caught himself looking over the book he was reading and half-smiling at the new guy.

“It’s taken,” Pat said.

“Don’t see anyone,” the kid said. And he was a kid. At least two years younger than Pat for sure, but two years at a war this brutal ages you. “If anyone dares to knock my shit off this bed, I’ll fight them.” 

Pat sat up, then. New guys these days could be full of themselves before the gravity of the situation set in. They hadn’t been drafted, they volunteered. And this guy was good-looking, strong. He probably ruled the place he went to bootcamp at, where doing push-ups and barking _Sir, yes, Sir,_ is all that counts for anything. 

Pat stood. He was the same height as this boy, maybe a little taller. He raised an eyebrow. “Really?” 

“This is the best spot to sleep on the ship, and I’m the best sailor. So yes, I will.” 

Pat reached up and pushed the kid’s boots off the bed. His mouth shifted from a lopsided smirk to a full-on grin. And the kid in front of him grinned too before they were on the floor in a flurry. The commotion they made attracted other sailors, who rushed in. They started taking bets. Pat didn’t fight, not really. But he was more experienced than the new guy. The new guy, though, was a fucking sight to behold. 

It was a funny thing: the new kid didn’t hit Pat, just pinned him effortlessly under his knee. 

“Had enough yet?” the new kid said, having not even broken a sweat as Pat wriggled under him. He stopped struggling after a minute. 

“I guess I have,” Pat said, and people collected their money.

_______________

Leo Pelides was unusual. Rumor had that his mom had won gold for her breaststroke in the 1952 Olympics. If you watched him swim, you might believe it. Anyone could see why he’d chosen the Navy over the other branches of the service by the way he cut through the water like a hot knife through butter.

But he was just as athletic out of the water. He was fast, running circles around even the fittest sailors. The Cherries, even the ones who arrived before him, all marveled at his speed and strength, followed him around, mooned over him. The older sailors, who’d already had a few years of combat under their belts, disliked him. Pat figured himself to be in the latter group. He saw the same thing they did: Leo was cocky and unfriendly and handsome and talented enough to get away with that kind of behavior. 

On the ship’s journey back to Vietnam, when they’d stop at the occasional port, they’d invite him out to bars. They frequented the kind that prostitutes hung out at, mostly because it was impossible not to, and the girls would flock around him in particular. And he’d ignore them all, looking bored and sucking down some watery whiskey. They stopped inviting him out after that. 

It had enraged Odysseus the most, though Pat couldn’t figure out why. 

“He’s got more pussy than he knows what to do with and he does nothing about it!” 

“ _You’ve_ got more pussy than you know what to do with,” said Dios, and it was true. Odysseus had a wife and baby back home in Ithaca, New York, a pregnant girlfriend in Olongapo, and another girl still in Saigon.

Pat would listen to these conversations with quiet amusement. It sounded more like sour grapes to him than anything. Odysseus would probably have a fourth girlfriend, if he could. And besides, Pat didn’t make offers to the girls, either, and no one was mad at him about it.


	2. Built to be Adored

Sometimes, Pat would catch the Pelides kid looking at him. Pat would look away quickly, feeling the eyes burning into him. They had not really spoken since that first day he had come aboard. So he was surprised, once they were on the ground in Vietnam, when Pelides unrolled his sleeping bag right next to Pat’s. 

Pat had picked a spot out of the way on purpose. He’d been stepped on before when one of his comrades would drink too much and stumble to their bedroll or get up in the middle of the night to piss. It was clear that Pelides was there because Pat was there, and Pat raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

Pat slept, always, with his hands around a knife and with one eye open. He didn’t envy Pelides beside him, whose restful sleep was something of an anomaly. Cherries didn’t sleep too well out here, but neither did anyone else. What kind of man could just fall asleep like that? Who couldn’t help but be suspicious of every movement in the treeline and every noise beyond the encampment? 

And that’s why he sensed the man hovering over Pelides with a blade in his hand. His eyes shot open and he leapt towards him, grunting loudly. He felt Pelides stir beside him as he wrestled the man. 

He wasn’t sure who cut who first. They both sustained flesh wounds, accidental slices that were inevitable when two men, both holding knives, were fighting. And then they both, simultaneously, remembered the knives, and the slices were no longer accidental. 

The man got on top of Pat and managed to flip him onto his stomach. Pat tried to crawl away, desperate, and then he heard a terrible, sickening crack. The man was no longer on top of him. He laid in a heap, his neck broken. The scuffle had only lasted thirty seconds, but everything had seemed to happen in slow motion. Pelides helped Pat to his feet. It was a considerate, gentle gesture and Pat almost could not believe that the same boy had just snapped someone’s neck. 

“You saved my life,” Pelides said, his voice grateful. “I didn’t hear him coming.” 

“You saved my life, too. I wouldn’t have won that fight,” Pat answered. 

“You’re bleeding,” Pelides said, and Pat looked down. 

“Huh,” Pat said, frowning at the warm, sticky red that soaked through his shirt. Then the adrenaline wore off and the pain set in. He closed his eyes, concentrating on keeping his breath steady. “Do you remember your first aid? My pouch is right there.” 

Pat stripped his shirt off, and looked at Pelides expectantly. Pelides seemed almost shy, the pouch in his hand. 

“I’ll wake someone else,” Pat said. If the kid was adverse to blood, he’d get over it pretty quick out here. But Pat wasn’t an asshole. He wasn’t going to make him dress a wound if his hands were still shaking from taking his first life. 

“No! No, I want to…” Pelides said, and unrolled some gauze. His touch was light on Pat’s arm and, despite the oppressive heat of the jungle, Pat shivered under his fingertips. He had been patched up before, of course. He thought of Odysseus’s ugly, square fingernails, of Dios’s rough skin, of the ungentle way Ajax had scrubbed Pat’s knees when he skinned them once. This was different from all of that. He thought maybe Pelides looked like the Sundance Kid tenderly wrapping up Butch Cassidy’s knuckles before their final shootout, with how Pelides was looking at him, and before he knew what he was doing, he stilled the hands dressing his wound and brought the boy’s knuckles to his lips. He pressed a kiss there. 

“Jesus fucking Christ, what happened here?” came a voice, Odysseus’ voice, to be exact, and Pelides snatched his hands back, looking away. Pat could tell, even in the dark, that Leo was blushing. He was too.

“Just got jumped is all,” Pat said. The shaking of his voice could be attributed to nerves. 

“Well, when there’s one, there’s usually more. I’ll wake the others. Christ, Skops, did you break his fucking neck with your bare hands?” 

“I did,” Leo volunteered. 

“Hell of a way to pop your cherry, Pelides. How’d you even know how to do that?” 

Leo shrugged, and Odysseus threw his hands up and started back to wake the rest.

“Skops?” Leo asked, a wicked grin on his face. He was remarkably relaxed for a teenaged former-Cherry who had just broken a man’s neck. 

“You’ll get your own dumb nickname in time,” Pat answered, trying to match his tone. But war didn’t come easy to him. It was better, he supposed, than killing Clint. Clint had only been mean. There was no way to justify what had happened back then. Here, everyone knew the war was fucked. Everyone knew they were in the wrong. But if Pat had to kill, he thought, Okay, I’m killing to protect Ajax before he’d died, or Dios, or even Odysseus. If Pat thought about things in the micro—him or mine, Pat would reason—rather than the macro, the ideology of it, it was survivable. It was never alright or pleasant, though, and it was a strange thing to see Leo calm and collected like this. 

The next morning, Pat packed up his gear in silence. He felt the dead man’s eyes boring into him from several feet away. He had always thought he’d get used to it one day--bodies twisted into odd angles, the smell of decay on good days and of burning flesh and hair on bad days. But he never did. When he was done packing, he leaned against his stuff and got out his rolling papers. 

“You smoke pot?” Pat asked Pelides as he mixed weed and tobacco into the folded paper. Before Pelides could answer, the sun was blocked by a shadow standing over them. 

“I’m taking the Cherries on a mission,” Odysseus said, and Pelides stood up. Pat, next to him, grabbed his wrist to pull him back down, but Pelides yanked it away. Maybe the kiss he’d pressed--stupidly, earnestly--into the boy’s hand was still fresh in his mind. Pat had honestly been surprised when Pelides hadn’t hauled off and punched him after. 

“You’re not a Cherry, you killed a guy last night,” Pat said, narrowing his eyes at Odysseus. 

“I want to go,” Pelides protested. 

“You hear that, Skops?” Odysseus said, triumphantly, like a bad winner. “He wants to go.” 

Odysseus left then, presumably to get the other Cherries and Pat sighed, frustrated, and raked his hands through his hair.

“Odysseus doesn’t outrank you, you know.” 

“So?” 

“So, you ever heard of a mission consisting entirely of new guys and one asshole?” 

“I’ve never heard of any missions, ever. I just got here.” 

“You’re right, Pelides. I’m sorry,” Pat said, and he meant it. Of course Pelides didn’t see what Odysseus was doing. “Odysseus is fucking with you guys. He does this whenever we get replacements in. He leads them on a brutal wild-goose chase for the whole day and you’ll be sore and exhausted tomorrow when the real work starts. The CO lets him do it because hazing is supposedly good for morale.” 

“Oh,” Pelides said, his brow knit. It occurred to Pat that maybe Pelides wasn’t used to being deceived. 

“Most volunteers these days are poor kids. They enlist for the three hots and a cot. That’s not you. Your family is well-off,” Pat said. He wasn’t mean about it, just factual, and Pelides grinned, a little embarrassed, a little impressed. Pat wasn’t dumb, and such an observation proved it. 

“Am I that obvious?” 

“Not really,” Pat answered kindly. 

“Is everyone around here like that? Mean?” Pelides nodded towards Odysseus, who was talking animatedly to a skinny Cherry he was about to drag mercilessly through the jungle. 

To his great shame, Pat realized he had not thought about how Pelides might perceive the situation. He probably ruled whatever town he hailed from, being pretty and exceptionally athletic. Here, people resented his abilities and his good looks, and it was entirely within the realm of possibility that Pelides didn’t understand why people were standoffish to him. 

“I’m not,” Pat offered, though he figured it was of little comfort. 

“No, you’re not,” Pelides said, turning to smile at Pat. They had been in the same outfit for weeks now and he had not seen Pelides smile nearly as much in all those weeks as he had today. Absently, he noticed that the green of their uniforms brought out the green of Pelides’ eyes, and he realized he’d been staring for a beat too long. 

“Alright, Pelides, let’s go!” Odysseus shouted from across the camp.

“On second thought, I’ll stay here,” Pelides shouted back. He turned to Pat and said, quietly, “I think I’ll stick with you from now on, if you don’t mind.” 

“I don’t mind,” Pat answered, lighting the joint he’d almost forgotten and passing it to Pelides.

_______________

Leo liked Pat. He was honest and kind, and Leo found himself only talking to him, if he could help it. He’d never been a particularly social guy and he knew his popularity back at bootcamp and before that, in school, had stemmed from his athleticism and his good looks rather than his personality.

Pat was quiet, usually, and it reminded Leo a little of the stoic cowboys he’d seen on TV when he was a kid. He talked a little like a cowboy, too, on the rare occasion that he did talk, and Leo found himself leaning in unconsciously whenever Pat spoke. 

And Pat was fiercely loyal. He’d save Leo a seat wherever they happened to settle down to eat, would look at him knowingly when they saw one of the other sailors do something dumb, and would keep him clear of rookie mistakes. More often than not, their knees would knock together when they sat in the back of a truck or their arms would brush and Leo would remember that strange moment after his first kill when Pat had kissed his fingers. He thought Pat maybe woke something up in him that night, and half-blamed his friend when he caught himself trying to brush against Pat, or caught his own eyes wandering south whenever they had to make use of the community showers. 

After two weeks in the jungle, Leo had to bite his fist to keep himself under control. Once, late at night, he was restless, doing whatever he could to keep his hands busy. He thumbed through Pat’s things, and found his identification card, the picture of Pat at 18 with freshly buzzed hair and huge, frightened eyes. 

He wanted to say, _Cute._ “Your real name is Patroclus?” is what Leo said instead, and almost kicked himself when he saw the fear flash across Pat’s eyes. 

“Come on,” Pat said pleadingly, and Leo heard the words that weren’t there: _Come on, don’t make fun of me. Come on, I trusted you. Come on._

“No, I mean, check this out,” Leo said quickly, almost apologetically, and pulled out his own ID, presenting it proudly. 

“Your real name is Achilles?” 

“We’re in the weird name club together,” he said. “Am I allowed to call you Patroclus? I like it.” 

“I’ll allow it,” Patroclus said, the edge of his lip quirking up. 

Leo loved that lazy half-smile, and without thinking, Leo reached out and ran his thumb over Pat’s lower lip. It had felt like such a natural thing that he almost wondered if it had gone unnoticed by Pat, but Pat’s mouth was in a full-on grin now, which suited Leo just fine.

_______________

They were given a few days off after their third week in the jungle, and Odysseus dragged a group of people to Da Nang. He’d asked Pat not to invite Leo, but Pat invited Leo anyway, and the two smirked at each other conspiratorially when Odysseus had hidden his annoyance poorly.

They all rode in the back of a truck heading that way, Pat and Leo, Odysseus and Dios, one of the new guys, who earned the nickname Auto his second day after boasting that he could hotwire anything. Odysseus, lover of chaos that he was, dared the skinny 18-year-old to hotwire one of the busses on base. The crazy bastard had accepted and was only stopped by Dios picking him up by the scruff of his neck and hauling him back to the others, Odysseus howling with laughter at the scene. Then there was another new kid who everyone was calling Ajax the Lesser, which Pat didn’t much care for. When someone died, he thought they ought to retire the nickname. The new Ajax didn’t measure up to the old one, either. Not by a long shot.

Throughout the ride, Leo’s entire left side was flushed with Pat’s right side, so crammed were they all in the back of the truck. Pat almost minded, because he felt something pleasant and urgent and deeply inconvenient coiling in his belly. 

When they arrived in the city, Odysseus, the apparent leader of this excursion, led them to a hole-in-the-wall hotel. 

“Cheapest in the city that’s also friendly to sailors,” he said. “Who’s bunking with who?” 

Patroclus grabbed Leo’s arm and then quickly let go of it, as though he was embarrassed, and Leo had to stop himself from smiling affectionately. Truly, Leo liked being claimed in such a way. 

Leo chose the room farthest away from the rest of the sailors, not that this was saying much in such a small hotel, and found his heart beating out of his chest as he threw his pack down on one of the two twin beds. Odysseus had told them all to meet in the lobby in an hour after they’d all showered and changed so they could all hit the bars. A lot can be done in an hour, Leo thought. 

“We’re two rooms over from everyone else,” Leo said, fiddling with the edge of the blanket in front of him. 

Patroclus furrowed his brow in confusion and Leo realized that his logic hadn’t been as obvious as he thought. He had never been nervous before--not when he shipped off to bootcamp, not when he was stationed, not even when he’d killed that first man--but in this moment, that was the emotion he identified in the pit of his stomach, and he choked on his words as he tried again: “I thought--we might--because of the noise--,” 

“The noise?” Patroclus asked, an eyebrow arched. Leo wasn’t looking at him, but he could hear the smile in his voice and felt his own cheeks flush. 

“Jesus, Patroclus, I’m trying--,” but he was cut off then, because Patroclus had closed the gap between them and their mouths crushed together. Something hungry came alive inside him and he pushed Patroclus down to the bed. He took off his own shirt and then Patroclus’ and dragged his teeth down Pat’s neck, down his chest, encouraged by the light whimpers he heard from his partner. When he got to his hips, he fumbled with Pat’s belt, and Patroclus quickly undid it and together they shucked aside the rest of his clothes. 

Leo took Patroclus’ hard cock in his hand and brought his mouth back up to meet Pat’s. He kept his rhythm steady, only speeding up as he felt Patroclus shudder and convulse beneath him.

“Achilles,” Patroclus gasped into Leo’s mouth. It was the first time he’d said his given name, and Leo thought it belonged in his mouth. Maybe it wasn’t the only thing of his that belonged in Pat’s mouth. 

Spurts of hot, white cum hit Pat’s belly, then. Leo let go, grabbing his own shirt, and wiped it across the mess. 

“You don’t have to do that,” Patroclus said, and when Leo glanced back up, he grinned. “And anyway, it’s your turn.”

_______________

They showered together after, Achilles standing behind Patroclus, kissing his shoulders under the steady stream of water.

“I didn’t think I’d have the guts to do that,” Achilles said. 

“I didn’t think I did, either,” Patroclus said, before turning around to kiss him on the mouth. The refractory period was over, and Achilles felt Patroclus stiffen against his hip. 

“Don’t we have somewhere we need to be?” Achilles nearly admonished, twisting his hip so as to grind against Patroclus. 

“I’m afraid that if we see everyone else, it’ll be written all over my face what’s happened.” 

“You’re not as easy to read as you seem to think. But I wouldn’t care if they knew.” 

“I think you would care,” Patroclus answered, cupping Achilles’ chin gently, “you just don’t realize it yet.” 

“In that case, it’d be worse if we didn’t show up,” Achilles said. “But we have twenty more minutes to kill.” 

He sank to his knees, then, and Patroclus braced himself against the shower’s tile before seeing white.

_______________

Achilles thought back to every happy moment of his life: winning touchdowns, coming first in the 100-meter dash, his dad smiling proudly, beating records at bootcamp, the hot Californian sun shining down, making him feel golden and brilliant. If he could distill all those moments, add them up, combine them, they would be dull and lifeless next to how he felt with Patroclus. With Patroclus by his side, he felt immortal, impossibly beautiful and impossibly real and impossibly loved.

He had always figured he was built to be adored, and, surrounded by people who did adore him, he wondered why the attention bored him at best and disgusted him at worst. With Patroclus, he realized it was because he had to adore back. And did he ever. He loved his Patroclus--sweet where he was cruel, gentle where he was harsh, softness next to strength, silver next to gold. Patroclus, of course, loved him back, and Achilles felt like the world had been built for them. It’s tough not to feel that way, when love and sex and violence are so new that the person committing the acts feels like they have invented them.


	3. μῆνῐς

Patroclus thought he might die for Achilles. Not hypothetically, like you would hold a lover tenderly and whisper _You’re my everything, I’d do anything for you, I’d die for you,_ into their ear, but literally. He hoped that if he got to die in this hellish war--going back to the United States, where he’d done the worst thing imaginable, was out of the question--it would be for someone profoundly beautiful. But it was possible that he wouldn’t get the opportunity. 

He could tell by looking at Achilles that he was going to make it out of this conflict without so much as a splinter. He just had that way about him that some guys did. He gave the impression of indifference when he wasn’t actively enjoying himself. It was as though he did not smell the napalm nor death, or if he did, it did not bother him. Perhaps that’s the real reason so many men seemed to resent him. He did not seem to share the trauma that bound them all together. He did not complain about small things like the heat. He did not grimace at the big things like the carnage. He was fine, more than fine. He was happy.

Once, an enemy had thrown a live grenade at them. Patroclus had thought to dive onto it for Achilles, but before he could, before the thought was even finished forming in his head, Achilles had picked the thing up calmly and thrown it overhand back to the enemy as casually as someone might toss a baseball to a friend in a game of catch. The enemy was no more a second later, and the explosion threw Patroclus back. There were tears streaming down his face, both a physical reaction from the heat of the fire and an emotional reaction from thinking that it was about to be the end. He felt Achilles pull him up and run his thumbs gently over Patroclus’ cheeks, wiping away the tears. 

“Look at the state of you,” Achilles had said fondly as he brought Patroclus closer. If they were caught holding one another out there, it’d be easily excusable. Tenderness can exist in tandem with violence, they had realized. Patroclus could sob into his secret lover’s arms where the others might see, so long as there was proof of their brutality at hand. It was a great truth, Patroclus thought, that they could love each other without blood.

_______________

They’d known each other six months when Patroclus told Achilles about Clint. Achilles could see the fear in his eyes, like this revelation would change things between them. He might have laughed if Patroclus hadn’t looked so sad. He had killed ten men at least since they’d met, and the only difference between that and what Patroclus had done was that Patroclus hadn’t meant to do it.

Achilles didn’t say it, but he would trade a thousand Clints to have Patroclus by his side. He’d trade everyone he had ever met, kill them himself in cold blood in front of their weeping relatives, burn down cities, destroy the entire world for him. He hated that Pat had suffered, but he was glad for it, too, because the alternative was Patroclus pulling the trigger of that pistol and firing a bullet into his lovely, gentle heart. He could not imagine a world in which Patroclus’ heart did not beat, and as if to reassure himself, he had dipped his head down to Patroclus’ chest and listened. It beat faster now that he was near, and Achilles smiled a little to himself before settling in to feel the rhythm against his cheek. _Thank Christ for Clint,_ Achilles thought.

_______________

Patroclus had heard people talking about Achilles’ rage. It was strange, being in such close quarters with someone, being attached at the hip, and never seeing this thing that everyone swore was there. He had seen its aftermath--blood on the deck, a Cherry put in his place, Achilles with swollen knuckles and a tender look in his eyes as he saw Patroclus coming around the corner. He knew it wasn’t a lie. Achilles had a temper. But he also couldn’t imagine someone who was so vulnerable with him also being someone who could punch a brand-new sailor just for looking at him wrong.

He didn’t see it, that is, until Achilles was eligible for R&R. They were in Olongapo at the time and took a Jeepney up to Manila for five days. No other sailors came with them, and in the back of the Jeepney, Patroclus leaned his head on Achilles’ shoulder. The driver said something in Tagalog, maybe something derogatory, maybe not, but Achilles pressed a kiss into Patroclus’ curls in response. 

Achilles had planned everything: the shitty hotel (the nicest one he could find that allowed sailors), trips to the old Spanish churches, and to Chinatown. They only had five days off to spend together, and Achilles wanted to make the most of it. 

When they made it to the hotel, Achilles pulled a wad of pesos out and thumbed through it to count out the payment. For someone so magnificent, Patroclus was always surprised at his naivety. Pat watched the eyes of the clerk at the front desk widen. It was a lot of money Achilles had pulled out, all ₱1000 and ₱500 notes, and when Achilles pulled Patroclus to the room, Pat stepped on the floorboards and pushed at ceiling tiles until he found a good spot. 

“We’re going to keep most of your money here while we’re out,” Patroclus said. 

“Why?” Achilles asked, frowning. 

“Because you’re a mark, Achilles. You didn’t notice how that guy was looking at you? You pulled out more pesos than he probably makes in six months! You might as well have told them that you’re rich and have no street smarts.” 

If Patroclus had even a single mean bone in his body, he might have thought Achilles deserved it, too. Establishments that accept sailors weren’t exactly known for their upstanding employees, and Achilles had flaunted his money. Not intentionally, of course, but he’d still done it. 

Achilles considered what Patroclus had said. He had a habit of noticing only Patroclus. Everyone else was inconsequential. He had not noticed how the clerk had looked at him because he had barely noticed the clerk himself. “It had not even occurred to me. Truly.” 

Patroclus smiled, counting out a few thousand pesos for Achilles’ wallet and putting the rest in the ceiling. “Well, that’s why you keep me around,” Patroclus said self-deprecatingly. 

“There are other reasons,” Achilles said before he pounced.

_______________

“Looks just like Europe,” Achilles said, his eyes fixed on the San Agustin Church.

“Probably because Europeans made it,” Patroclus said, his grin wide. “You Catholic?” 

“My dog tags say I’m Eastern Orthodox, which is pretty much the same thing. My mom would kill me if she heard me say it, though,” Achilles grinned back. 

“I’ve never been to Europe,” Patroclus said.

“Lotsa old stuff, some of it’s boring. I’ll take you. I think you’d like it.” 

“You’ve been?” Patroclus asked. He liked hearing about their imagined future together, a future that he was certain he would not live to see. 

“My mom’s Greek. She moved to France a few years ago because the government in Greece was looking pretty hairy. She’s still scared because of World War II, I guess. I used to visit her every summer and we’d always go someplace new.” 

Achilles would sometimes say things like that that would demonstrate his family’s considerable wealth and his privilege. As they strolled around the grounds of the church, he told Patroclus about how, when he was 15, his mother took him to Paris. He’d loved the city; it was filthy. He’d never seen so many rats in his life, and he delighted at the millions of skulls when she had taken him to the catacombs. He kept a running tally of how many men he saw pissing in the streets and would gleefully tell his mother what number he was up to. The entire time, she’d looked like she was on the precipice of a life-ending migraine. She had taken him there expecting the culture to sink into his skin. She thought he’d marvel at the limestone buildings that gave Paris her dreamy cohesiveness, thought he’d be excited to see the Louvre or Notre Dame, but teenage boys aren’t known for their ability to appreciate the arts. 

Pat had liked the story. He liked the visual of Achilles, six inches shorter than he was now, with cherubic features, pointing at a urinating Frenchman and shouting, “Mom! That’s the twelfth one!” and his mother, long-sufferingly, trodding on. He couldn’t relate to a single sentence. Firstly, he had never been further than Wyoming before he’d been drafted. And secondly, he had not known his mother. He could barely get a word out of his father on the subject. He knew she’d been Ute, or perhaps Arapaho, or half of one or the other (his father couldn’t seem to keep it straight), and he knew that she’d left when he was a baby. He didn’t blame her, either. He supposed that if he had a choice, he’d have gotten away from his dad, too. Something in him was sure that she had had a good reason for not taking him along. 

When they returned to the hotel, they grasped hands on their way up the stairs. Patroclus gave Achilles a swift peck as they ascended. When they talked about it later, neither of them could remember why they had returned to their room in the middle of the day. They ventured guesses. Did Pat forget the camera? Did Achilles need to change his shirt? Was it for a nooner? 

They unlocked the door to see the clerk in their room, a floorboard raised. He had not found the money yet, obviously, but he looked terrified at having been caught. 

Achilles was on him in a split second. He didn’t hit the man and dodged the blows coming his way expertly. The man was clearly fighting with all he had, and Achilles was just tiring him out, really. It was his favorite fighting strategy, Patroclus had learned, and most men found it humiliating. There was nothing worse to the average tough guy than to be rendered impotent. Pat had learned, later, that he had been the first person Achilles had ever fought to accept his defeat with grace. 

“The second you smiled at me when I had you pinned under me, I knew I was a goner,” Achilles had told him that first night in Da Nang after they’d fucked urgently for the first time, and then tenderly a second time, and then languidly the third. “Couldn’t take my eyes off of you, if I’m honest.” 

So, since the only thing getting hurt was the man’s pride, Patroclus sat on the edge of one of the two twin beds. It was still made up, its sheets tucked into pristine hospital corners, and it was obvious to anyone who’d been in the room that only one bed had been slept in. 

Achilles finally pinned the man down. He looked bored having done it, but the man under him was furious. 

“You think I don’t know what you are doing in here?” the man said.

Achilles did not look like himself, then. His incisors seemed longer, his eyebrows arched more severely. He looked like he was excited to be given an excuse to smash the guy’s face in. “What are we doing in here?” His voice was a purr that made even Patroclus want to look away. 

“You are fucking,” the man said, his voice low and accusatory. 

“And?” Achilles asked, like he wanted to get called queer or a faggot. As the man squirmed under Achilles fruitlessly, Patroclus wondered, almost idly, if those words were even in the English vernacular for the average Filipino. 

“That’s enough, Achilles,” Patroclus said, and when Achilles didn’t budge, Pat rose and walked to where he had the man pinned on the floor. He touched Achilles’ cheek gently, and Achilles seemed to snap back to reality. 

“He was going to steal from us,” Achilles said. 

“Are you going to try it again?” Patroclus asked the man. 

The man shook his head, terrified. The inhuman, effortless way Achilles had subdued him would have scared away even the most street-hardened thieves. 

“He called us gay,” Achilles insisted, still not easing up on the man. 

At this, Patroclus laughed. He leaned in, pressing a kiss to Achilles’ temple. “Sweetheart,” he murmured. “Sweetheart, we are.” 

“Oh,” he said, deflated. He was Achilles again, no longer a cold and furious monster, and he let the man up. He scurried out, muttering in Tagalog under his breath. 

“It’s a Catholic country. All things considered, I’d say he was tolerant. We got off easy,” Patroclus said, dragging his lips down Achilles’ face, along that golden jaw, until they smiled into each other’s mouths. 

“That fucking guy got off easy,” Achilles muttered, but there was no fire behind his words. 

“Hush,” Patroclus said, peppering kisses down Achilles’ neck, smiling easily when he heard Achilles’ shudder and saw the gooseflesh he raised. Making Achilles tremble--for how unshakeable he was in every other facet of his existence--felt a lot like having the power to make mountains move and stars collide. If Patroclus were a different man, he might feel dizzy with this power. Drunk with it, even. But he didn’t need to move mountains. He only needed Achilles, his hard body and harder cock pressed against him. He only needed Achilles, only needed to hear his groan as Patroclus took the velvety head of his cock in his mouth. Achilles, laid bare in body and soul, crying out as he came. 

“There’s something on your chin,” Achilles murmured, swiping away whatever had dribbled there. 

Patroclus smiled and tucked a lock of hair behind Achilles’ ear. “I did not like how you lost your temper.” 

“I can work on it, if you’d like,” Achilles said thoughtfully.

No one had offered to do anything to make Patroclus more comfortable, and he was suddenly overwhelmed by what Achilles was to him: someone who saved his life, who dressed his wounds, who kissed him. He had told Achilles about Clint and Achilles had not looked at him with disgust but with understanding. Something raw and brutal struck him. 

“I’m in love with you,” he said. He could sense how wide his eyes were, how vulnerable he looked. And he was surprised to find that Achilles’ eyes were just as wide. 

“I’m in love with you, too,” Achilles said. His voice was awestruck. 

“You are?” 

“Yes,” Achilles said, like their agreement on the subject was some kind of inexplicable miracle. And then his mouth split into a wide smile. Patroclus’ cheeks hurt and he realized that he had a smile to match.

_______________

On Monday, November 26th, 1973, Patroclus and Achilles crouched in the bush. They’d been separated from everyone but Dios, and Patroclus was grateful that they were with him and not any of the other guys. Dios was competent, brave yet careful. With Achilles and Dios around, Pat figured they had a decent shot getting out of this alive.

Dios was several yards away from them but in sight, and Patroclus clenched his jaw as they heard Charlie talk not far from their hiding spots. Achilles worried a large stone in his hand, rubbing his thumb over the surface. It was unusual; Achilles did not fidget in battle. There was nothing so streamlined, so built for war, as Achilles. Yet he turned the stone over in his right hand, and Patroclus huddled against him. 

The enemy seemed to know they were somewhere and did not give up looking, though it seemed that they were joking around more than anything. One man made a meal out of looking around a log, making his buddies laugh. 

Patroclus met eyes with Dios. They shared a look of weariness. That was something they did not tell him about war. They told him about the gore, they told him about the smell. They told him about the comradery and adventures and the women and the mud and the shell shock and the blood. But they did not tell him that he would be bone tired the entire way. Unless you were Achilles, who seemed to exist in a realm all his own here, you would never know rest when your boots were on the ground. 

Patroclus liked Dios. They’d been Cherries together. He’d known him since the beginning. He’d gotten dragged through the jungle by Odysseus alongside Dios, and when Odysseus had revealed the entire excursion to be a ruse, he’d fallen to his knees, exhausted, and said, “ _Dios mio._ ” The name stuck. 

Pat wondered if he should have let Achilles go on that pointless trek through the jungle. Maybe he’d have become better buddies with Auto, though they were friendly as it was. Before he could think further, a chill ran up his spine. The enemy was mere feet away from them and approaching fast. He and Achilles were done for. Dios might survive. That was some solace. He grabbed Achilles’ left hand, the one not holding the stone, and kissed his beautiful, graceful fingers. 

At that same moment, Achilles flicked his right wrist and the stone landed, neatly, perfectly, _intentionally_ at Dios’ feet. It caused a wet noise, so moist was the jungle, and Dios himself let out a shocked gasp. Patroclus and Dios were still making eye contact, and they mirrored disbelief at one another. Patroclus thought the betrayal didn’t even register before Charlie tore Dios’ chest apart with gunfire. 

The horror was visceral, and Patroclus realized he was screaming into Achilles’ hand, brought firm against his mouth. He felt his eyes roll up and his vision came and went. He hyperventilated and cried against that steady golden hand. When Achilles released him, what felt like hours later, he hit the ground with his fists. He crawled to the mess that had once been Dios and fell over it. He clutched the sides of Dios’s bruised, distorted face and wept. The blood coated his face and arms and shirt, hot and wet and sticky. 

“We have to go,” Achilles said. His voice sounded like it always did, calm and sweet, and something about that made Patroclus weep even harder. 

“Why did you do this?” Patroclus said between sobs, and Achilles scooped Patroclus up. He carried him back to the rest of the outfit. 

“What happened?” Patrcolus heard Aggy, the commanding officer, ask when he saw Patroclus in Achilles’ arms, head lolling back, covered in blood.

“Sir, Charlie got Dios. I think Skops is just shaken, sir,” Achilles said. He only ever called him Skops in front of other people, as if people might suspect they were sucking each other’s dicks if he called him Pat. Pat did not feel _just shaken_ , he felt delirious, and the voices of Achilles and Aggy seemed to get further away as he lost consciousness. 

When he awoke, it felt like he had come back from the dead. He had not dreamed while he was out. For a few moments, he forgot what had happened to Dios, and who had made it happen. But his eyes fluttered open and Achilles was there, and the savage reality hit him like a punch to the gut. 

Achilles, who had thrown that stone with such precision, stood before him. 

“I didn’t think I’d be here when you woke up,” Achilles said, sounding pleased. “I’ve been here whenever I can make it. That’s good luck, huh?” 

Patroclus closed his eyes. He thought he might vomit, so sickened was he by Achilles’ light tone. “Did you do it on purpose?” It was a stupid question. Who throws a rock by mistake? 

The hatred in his own voice, gravelly from disuse for however long he was out, surprised even him. 

“Yes,” Achilles said. His voice was small, and Patroclus can hear him kicking at the linoleum floor like a child who’d been caught breaking the rules. But Achilles was not a child, he was a grown man who had done something irreversible. Cowardly. Dishonorable. Unforgivable. 

Suddenly, Patroclus was exhausted. Eyes still closed, he turned his head away. 

When he woke again, Achilles was gone, and the nurse gave him a meal that he only picked at and his clothes--he assumed they were newly issued, because no one could hope to get all that blood out--and discharged him. He walked back to his ship on the base in a daze, the hot air making him feel even more sluggish than he already was. He remembered a movie he’d seen just before he got drafted, _Night of the Living Dead_. That’s what he thought he must look like: one of Romero’s monsters lumbering along, ugly and stiff and stupid. It’s a wonder that horror movies exist, when every generation of American men for a hundred years has known the truth: that an unnatural death is not frightening, it is sad. 

When he had clutched Dios, it was cold. He felt dry, old snow scraping his knees, smelled pine needles. He could have sworn he’d seen steam, awful fucking steam, rising from his torso. And the surprise. His, Dios’, Clint’s, his again. A never-ending slide show of shock and gore ran through his mind and he wondered if these ghosts would follow him in death.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Footnotes for Chapter 3, μῆνῐς: 
> 
> 1\. The chapter title, μῆνῐς, is the ancient Greek word for rage (particularly rage of the gods and demigods) and is the first word of the Iliad. (Sort of, it’s conjugated, so it’s μῆνιν.) 
> 
> 2\. I make a pretty obvious allusion to _Apocalypse Now_ (1979) in the beginning of this chapter. While that particular film is by no means perfect, I felt that it was seminal enough to get a nod in this piece. 
> 
> 3\. Notes on the Philippines: 
> 
> a. A Jeepney is basically a minibus, they’re pretty common in the Philippines.  
> b. Tagalog is the language spoken in the Philippines.  
> c. The Philippines were colonized by the Spanish for quite a while, and therefore there’s quite a lot of Baroque architecture.
> 
> 4\. On the subject of Achilles talking about what religion is on his dog tags: according to one vet I spoke to, the US military required--at least during the Vietnam War era--you to say a religion so they knew what kind of burial to give you if they found your body. The vet I spoke to didn’t have a religion but apparently that wasn’t an option, so he was like “Fuck it,” and said he was Lutheran. I thought that was kind of funny.
> 
> 5\. The situation with the hotel clerk in Manila getting caught stealing money is a true story that an American Vietnam War vet told me while I was doing research on this piece.


	4. Wishbone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "we both know how it goes. I say _I want you inside me_  
>  and you hold my head underwater, I say _I want you inside me_  
>  and you split me open with a knife. I’m battling monsters, half-monkey, half-tarantula,  
> I’m pulling you out of the burning buildings and you say _I’ll give you anything_  
>  But you never come through." _Wishbone_ , Richard Siken

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: Towards the end of the chapter, Achilles disassociates. It's only about a paragraph and a half, but for anyone sensitive to that sort of thing, I just want you to be warned.

When they’d been thirteen or so, Clint had gone through a phase where he was obsessed with torture techniques. Patroclus could not tell if this stemmed from genuine interest, sadism, or if it was simply because Clint had seen how Pat had recoiled at the mention of violence. Clint’s favorite method was a ritual killing of Viking origin called a blood eagle. The executioner would sever the victim’s ribs from his spine and pull the lungs through the opening created to fashion wings. 

And so in his dreams, he would see Clint and Dios with their lungs spread behind them like they were about to take flight. He’d see Achilles with a ghastly smile, all teeth, upon his face. Achilles would be holding his machete in his hands, blood dripping down its blade. 

_How could you?_ Patroclus would try to say, but the words would get caught in his throat. Achilles would arch a brow, like he understood the question Pat had choked on. 

_How could I?_ that minute facial tic said.

So Patroclus would look at his hands and realize he, too, had his machete out, and it was just as wet with blood. 

He lost sleep. He couldn’t close his eyes without seeing Dios, he couldn’t open them without seeing Achilles. Everywhere he looked, he was reminded of what had happened.

_______________

When Patroclus broke up with Achilles, that old cliche, _It’s not you, it’s me._ came out of his mouth. Achilles thought maybe he believed it. Gentle, loving Patroclus, who tensed up now whenever Achilles gripped something in his hand, probably thought that it was his fault that he couldn’t get over what Achilles had done.

Achilles had imaginary arguments in his head. _Would you rather they find us, kill us both?_ he’d say, or _You don’t know that Dios would have survived after they’d shot us,_ or _They weren’t going to stop looking. It was about the numbers. One death is better than two._ And in his head, he always lost these arguments, because in the end, none of his points were really true. He’d done it only to save Patroclus. He couldn’t say sorry, either, because he wasn’t. He’d have done it the exact same way if he’d gotten a second chance. It was better to have Patroclus alive and hating him than dead and having loved him. 

“I’m sorry, Achilles,” Patroclus had said, anguished. This was as hard for him, too, Achilles realized. He thought if he hadn’t been so blindsided, he might have been able to change Patroclus’ mind. But he couldn’t weasel his way out of things like Odysseus and he wasn’t scrappy like Auto. He’d never had anything taken away from him. He’d never had to fight to keep something. “I can’t look at you without seeing Dios’ blood.” 

Achilles had begged him not to. It was the only thing he could think to do. He got on his knees and fucking begged. “I can’t survive without you. I can’t. Don’t leave me.” 

Achilles could see Patroclus falter. He thought, _this is it, he’ll change his mind._ But he didn’t. “You were fine before me. You will be fine after. It’s just going to hurt us, both, for a while.” 

“I wasn’t fine, Patroclus. You saved my life. I won’t be fine.” Achilles thought there was something deeply fucking wrong with him. Nothing in his life had had any real meaning before. Only with Patroclus by his side did he find anything at all interesting. It occurred to him later that he could have lied and said he’d been scared, that he was sorry. He could have said _Dios haunts my dreams, too. Don’t make me sleep alone_. But lying had never been in his nature, and Patroclus would have known it wasn’t true. 

After the incident with Dios, Achilles still sat next to Patroclus. He hoped that if he continued to show his face, Patroclus might come around, change his mind. Maybe he’d forget for a minute and run his fingers absent-mindedly over Achilles’ forearm or lean his head against his shoulder. Achilles knew he only needed to get his foot in the door to get a second chance. Patroclus still loved him, he could tell. But Patroclus was unyielding. He’d gone back to being quiet and reserved around him. If he had something to say, he’d say it to the group, or to Auto. 

Everyone had noticed a shift between the two and had come to the wrong conclusion: Pat, the obvious faggot of the two, had put the moves on Achilles. He wasn’t sure which idea, in the abstract, upset him more: the idea that he would reject Patroclus or the idea that it was Patroclus, and not himself, who was the obviously queer one. After all, he, being the jealous bitch that he was, had noticed the way Pat sometimes looked at women. Achilles never spared a second glance to anyone but Patroclus. 

So Achilles mercilessly beat anyone who suggested either, fully aware that it only served to drive a wedge further between him and Patroclus. And the irony was not lost on him that the more he went on the offensive, hitting anyone who dared say a word or look the wrong way at Pat, the more people were convinced that the rumors were true. But he simply couldn’t stop himself from descending into violence. When he was particularly angry, he didn’t even need provocation. 

He saw the way people walked on eggshells around him and it made him all the more furious. He saw the way Patroclus looked at him, disappointment under a veil of indifference, and it usually slowed his fists. But it didn’t stop them. Patroclus had forfeited any right he had to tell Achilles what to do. Sometimes, when he was particularly petulant, he’d beat someone to a pulp right in front of Patroclus. He’d make eye contact, try to get blood on Pat. _Look at what a fucking monster I am without you,_ Achilles would say without words. But later, he’d have to resist the urge to crawl into Patroclus’ lap like a child seeking comfort and forgiveness.

_______________

Somehow, the world kept moving. The sun would rise and set, he and Auto would eat breadfruit together in the shade of a palm tree when they’d get a day off, dolphins would swim alongside the ship in a happy game of chase. It all felt empty to him. And there’d be gossip. People whispered that the CO’s wife left him. Achilles thought about what he’d say to Patroclus, were Patroclus speaking to him. _Serves him right, that prick._ But then, with a sharp pain, he’d remember that he and the CO were in the same position. And it served him right, too.

Achilles slept with a girl, an American nurse from the base in Hawaii, and made a real show of taking her somewhere in front of the other guys. He’d hoped it’d make Patroclus jealous, but it didn’t. In fact, Patroclus had looked at him with something akin to pity. It had infuriated Achilles, and when he fucked the girl from behind he imagined it was Patroclus. 

“Slow down, that hurts,” the girl had said, and hearing her little feminine chime of a voice shattered the illusion that he was hate-fucking his ex. He pulled out and got dressed and left without saying goodbye. 

More Cherries came, and Achilles couldn’t decide who looked worse: the frightened boys from poor farms in Nebraska or miner’s sons from Appalachia who joined because there was no other choice for them, or the men who’d been fighting for years and looked like they’d met the Devil and found him docile.

_______________

One Cherry in particular was especially bad in the bush. He didn’t follow orders and stepped away for no reason. He was antsy. And when he tripped a wire when he walked off the path, setting off Charlie’s trap and dying damn near instantly, no one was all that surprised.

Achilles walked in front of Patroclus in the bush, always. Even after Dios, even when Pat would try to get away with him because _I can’t fucking look at you out here, I’m serious,_ Achilles wouldn’t be separated from him. So they were standing next to each other when shit hit the fan. Achilles surged forward, a blur to everyone. He always did think he was invincible. He got two enemies hand-to-hand, and the enemy was starting to realize that eliminating Achilles would have to take priority. Patroclus figured this about half a second before the enemy did, and dove on top of Achilles. 

“Pat, what--” Achilles started, before he saw the blood. “You took a bullet for me.” 

“Can’t even feel it,” Patroclus said, but that wasn’t exactly true. They’d gotten his knee, and that he couldn’t feel, but shrapnel had also cut up his back, and it burned. 

“You saved my life,” Achilles said stupidly. He said that an awful lot, it seemed. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Patroclus said, and he heard his voice straining. 

“Christ. Fuck. I’m gonna carry you to the evac zone.” 

“I’m fine, sweetheart. I am. I’d always hoped it’d be for you.” If this was it, he may as well be honest. _I love you, Achilles. I love you. I forgive you about Dios._

“You aren’t making any fucking sense, Pat,” Achilles said. “I’m not fucking leaving you out here. Odysseus! We have to get Pat to the helicopter!” 

Patroclus felt something against his mouth, then, and tasted the salt of tears. He realized he was being kissed before he got wrapped up. He smelled exhaust and heard an unfamiliar voice chuckle, “No way this poor fucker’s keeping his leg,” before everything went black.

_______________

Odysseus had seen Achilles kissing Patroclus, and Achilles could not bring himself to care. He was elsewhere entirely. He felt himself liquifying, dripping and meandering like the roots of the banyan trees around him. He oozed and congealed into the shape of a monster, huge and ugly. He picked up men and devoured them whole and he was insatiable. His mouth used to love and kiss and now it killed and his stomach was a cemetery. He touched his abdomen, surprised it was still there after his transformation into this beast, and remembered how gently he’d been laid down there, once, in Manila. Patroclus biting into his shoulder as he came inside him.

“Leo,” he heard someone say, then he felt the sting of a slap. “Fucking Leo, where the fuck did you go?” 

Achilles blinked and looked down at his regular, human body. He was covered in dirt and blood. His shirt was gone. “I don’t know,” he said, frowning. 

“Jesus fucking Christ. There’s a stream a mile east of here. You’ve gotta wash that shit off of yourself or they’re going to commit you,” Odysseus said. “They might throw you in the brig for desertion. We gotta spin this somehow. You got lost.” 

“What do you care if I get thrown in the brig?” Achilles asked. He heard how hostile he sounded. He knew Odysseus was only helping. He did not care. 

“I have a strong suspicion that’s not your blood you’re covered in. So if this episode was a one-time thing, and you’re just upset about your buddy, I’d rather have someone capable of this on my side.” 

“ _Buddy_ ,” Achilles sneered. “You can get put in for sodomy, too, you know.” 

“Just fucking wash up so I can drag you back to camp and say you got disoriented or something. And keep your fucking mouth shut, because if Skops survives, he’ll get honorably discharged with a Purple Heart but if you keep talking crazy, you’ll both be fucked.” 

That shut him up. He followed Odysseus through the jungle, listening to him rant about how he’s the only thing keeping their outfit from falling apart. He’d been missing, he found out, for nearly 24 hours. That seemed strange to him; he had been that hungry, grotesque creature for eons.

“And I’m not going to even tell you how I found you. The shit you left in your wake,” Odysseus shook his head. “You seriously can’t remember?” 

Achilles scrubbed himself when they reached the stream. He tried to imagine himself being baptized by the water. _Welcome back to humanity,_ he thought, but he did not feel human. And if Patroclus did not survive, he would never feel human again.


	5. If Laurie and Reg Fucked

Patroclus did not get the mercy of being out for a week or two. He woke up nauseous as he had never been before, his back sore where he’d had the bite of shrapnel rake over him, and knew from the rocking he felt at once that he wasn’t on land. His bed was one among twenty that he could see, and he did not have to tear the bedding off of him to know what had become of his leg. 

It was dark, save for a bit of light streaming in from the porthole nearby, and he was thirsty and itchy and too hot. He shifted and let out a pained gasp. 

“You don’t want to be doing that. The night nurse is strict,” came a whisper from the bed next to him. As his eyes began to adjust, he could make out a muscled figure wrapped up in bandages glowing in the pale light. His arm was in a sling and his leg was elevated and in plaster.

“Let me guess. You were the lucky one in a foxhole.” The man’s voice was low, and Patroclus had to strain to hear what he’d said. 

“Nah,” Patroclus answered, fighting through waves of nausea and pain. He had spent more or less his whole life not complaining, though, and so cracking a joke came easily to him. “Got my leg stuck in a vending machine on leave.” 

There was a muffled laugh. “Well, at least you’ve still got a sense of humor. That’s more than I can say about half the bastards in here.” 

“Dove on top of my friend who didn’t see the sniper aiming for him. Don’t remember much after that,” Patroclus admitted when he was certain that his voice wouldn’t reveal his physical discomfort. 

“You army?” 

“Navy.” 

“Marines,” the man said, and Patroclus could see the flash of his teeth.

“Guess that makes us rivals,” he mused. “I’m Pat.” 

“Hector.” 

He and Hector fell into an easy friendship. They were both injured enough that their imminent discharges were no question. Patroclus learned that they were on a hospital ship in Da Nang’s harbor. The porthole nearest them faced the city, and when they finally set him up with crutches, he’d try not to appear too wistful as he looked out at the city and remembered when, somewhere in that skyline, he came alive under someone else’s fingertips. 

Patroclus could see Hector watching him from the corner of his eye and fought a sigh as he stared at the city lights. 

“Got a girl in the city?” Hector asked. 

“Nah, just wondering what the ol’ guys are up to. We went to Da Nang a few times and I always bunked with the same guy. I wonder who he’s bunking with now.” 

“It’s weird, the things you think about from over here. I wonder who’s looking out for my brother. Every day they don’t come and tell me he got himself killed, I’m surprised.” 

Patroclus offered a sad half-smile and returned to his bed. 

Hector was patient and sweet. He repeated himself often because his head injury impeded his short-term memory, and Patroclus did not mind. He liked to listen.

Sometimes when Hector would tell him stories about Troy, Alabama, about his seven brothers and three sisters, or about his girlfriend, Andy, Patroclus’s mind would wander—quite by accident—to Achilles, Hector’s very antithesis. He’d look at Hector’s aquiline nose, his ruggish looks, the scar that cut a line through his eyebrow, the warm brown of his eyes and bulk of his muscles, and think about how cold Achilles’s eyes looked, like the dangerous green of the sky before a tornado touched down. He thought of how Achilles did not have a single blemish on all of his body, thought of his compact muscles and refined features. 

When Hector was first allowed to walk, his wobbly steps around the rows of hospital beds only served to remind Patroclus of the way Achilles would walk with speed and purpose and grace. 

At night, Achilles would come to him in dreams. Sometimes just his mouth, just his cock, just his ass. Sometimes all of him, laying on his side, propped up on one elbow, saying _I love you_. He would wake up hard, gasping, and, unable to do anything, would scrunch his eyes shut and pray for the lust to pass. 

And one night he opened his eyes to Hector’s stare. 

“You were dreaming,” said Hector, his voice low. Patroclus looked around questioningly. As if to answer that question, he added, “The night nurse is on her break.” 

His dream was still fresh in his mind, his lips having just crushed against wine, as it were, and the heat he felt from the body in front of him was not Achilles’s. 

“Always bunked with the same guy?” Hector asked. “His name wouldn’t happen to be Achilles, would it?” 

Patroclus’s jaw dropped. He had known he talked in his sleep. He had woken himself up every night during bootcamp screaming about Clint. But he had not thought that dreams of yearning, too, would spill out of his mouth as he slept.

“Would it?” Hector repeated harshly, and Patroclus realized that Hector was hard, too. He had mistaken lust for anger, so he ground his hips up to meet Hector’s over him. It was clear, immediately, that Hector did not know what he was doing with a man. It was clear, too, that neither were each other’s first choice. But this felt better than jerking off quickly and shamefully while the night nurse sipped her coffee in the galley. It’s not as if people were lining up to fuck either of them at the moment. 

Hector came quickly and a lot, Patroclus following soon after. He thought about how he hadn’t minded Achilles’s cum on his chest, had not minded when Achilles pressed himself against him after the fact. Now, he felt like he needed a shower, having a different man’s sweat on him, and his feelings were not hurt in the slightest when Hector scrambled up and back to his bed. 

“This wasn’t….you are gonna…” Hector managed from his bed. 

“It wasn’t and I’m not,” Patroclus said, trying to make his voice sound reassuring. 

In the morning, Patroclus felt Hector’s relief when he pretended last night had not happened, and he wasn’t surprised to wake up in the night with Hector on top of him again. Sex without love was not so hard, it turned out. He was not able to close his eyes and imagine it was anyone other than Hector, though he knew that’s exactly what Hector was going, and sometimes he wondered what would happen if he reached up and kissed Hector’s neck. 

Would Hector punch him? Melt into the touch and moan, _Andy_? Or, perhaps worst of all, would Hector ignore it? 

The doctor saw Patroclus on his rounds and told him that bits of metal would always bite into his back; getting it all out would be painful and expensive. He had thought it was funny. This whole thing had started with a gun. It had ended with a gun. Then a doctor looked at him and said, you will always have bullets inside of you. 

Now that he and Hector were fucking, they were not longer friends, not really, and he longed to talk to someone about the scars making constellations on his back. 

He wrote a letter to Achilles that day, which, every time he redrafted it, got more and more contrived, until he finally wrote a boring account of his stay (omitting Hector), and sent it to Auto.

_______________

He had not set foot in the continental United States in years, and when his feet struck the ground, he could not help but feel like the mythos of a homeland was a lie. He was rootless, after all. It was hot in San Francisco, and they wouldn’t let them open the windows on the bus that took them off base. You’ll find out why soon enough, the officer had told them.

And find out they did. San Francisco, it turned out, had been an inauspicious spot to be released into civilian life. There was a crowd just outside the gates, and as soon as they were visible, the bus was pelted with fruit. 

“They’re protesting the war,” said the officer.

“But we’re all discharged,” said one of the passengers. 

Patroclus rubbed the spot on his thigh just before the skin stretched and turned tender and for the first time in his life, was hit with a deep sense of injustice about his situation. He had not wanted to join, he had been forced. He had not wanted to survive, Achilles had loaded him onto a helicopter. And here these people were, rubbing his nose in it like you’d rub a puppy’s face into soiled carpet. Patroclus did not blame them, really. It had been a disgusting war. Maybe he deserved to have his snout rubbed in it.

BABYKILLER, one of the signs read, and the hum of the traffic sounded too much like a helicopter and the blue of the sky was too much like the blue of those fucking draft capsules and Patroclus sunk down into his seat and tried not to feel anything.

_______________

His prosthetic was shit. It’d be a year yet until they’d invent one worthwhile, and years until they started being comfortable. His gait was off but it hardly mattered on the back of the cheapest motorcycle he could find in the Bay Area and soon he zoomed back to Colorado with $50 left, stored safely in his boot.

_______________

**April 30th, 1974**

**Patroclus,**

**Auto gave me your address. I hope you don’t mind.**

**I had a dream last night that I just had to send you a letter. For some reason, I knew it was going to be the last thing I was ever going to say to you. I was convinced I’d be dead by the time you got it. I handed the letter off--I don’t even know what I’d written to you--during mail call and the guy turned around and stepped right on a landmine. The thing that really got me, though, was that the letter, carried by the wind of the explosion, landed back into my fucking hands with just the faintest misting of blood over your name and address. For a second after I woke up the philosopher in me thought maybe it was a metaphor for futility or something. But I think dreams are probably just random thoughts in your subconscious and I’ll be alive and well when you get this.**

**Auto told me you’re making use of the GI Bill. I will, too, if this war ever ends.**

**I don’t feel like myself without you. Even after you ended things, you were still there, you know? I could still see you. Now it’s like the light’s gone out. I eat because I have to, I run laps because I have to, I shower and sleep and march forward because I have to.**

**Remember when Aggy threatened to give you an Article 15 for damaging government property because you got that nasty sunburn? I always wondered how far that extended. When I’m feeling mean, I think they should actually give you one for me, even though you’re discharged and it’s just my heart that’s broken. When I’m feeling meaner, I think they ought to give me one because it’s my fault and I know that. Kind of odd to think that the government owns me, when I always felt like yours.**

**Fuck, this letter got out of hand. You don’t have to write me back or anything.**

**Things are going pretty bad over here. With any luck, we’ll have lost by my birthday.**

**I miss you. I love you. I’m sorry for all of it.**

**Achilles**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Footnotes for Chapter 5, If Laurie and Reg Fucked
> 
> 1\. The title is a reference to The Charioteer by Mary Renault  
> 2\. An Article 15, if you couldn't figure out by context, is a punishment without the need of a court martial in the military.


	6. Silver Chain

Briseis Mynes taught a few classes in the natural sciences to undergrads while earning her PhD. Women in science had it tough, and her male students more often asked her what her plans were for Saturday than they did about the homework. So she was wary when a student from Geology 101 rather clumsily walked up to her after she’d dismissed her class on a lecture day. 

“Ms. Mynes?” the man said. She’d told everyone two weeks ago, at the start of the semester, to call her Briseis, and the politeness struck her as quite green. 

“Yes?” she said, glancing at her watch. She had another class to teach across campus in fifteen minutes and she had to stop by her office to grab a stack of papers. “Can you make this quick, or walk with me?” 

“Er--” the man started, and though his skin was on the darker side, she could have sworn she saw his cheeks color. “That’s just it. Our practical exam next week--we’ll have to move around quite a bit, huh? Be on our feet for the whole 90 minutes?” 

She looked at the man. He was tall, broad-shouldered and in impeccable shape. “Yes. There will be four minerals on each table for you to identify, and to prevent cheating, only three students can be at one table at a time. There will be quite a bit of shuffling around, and no one will be seated.”

“Ah,” the man said, running a hand through his dark hair. He looked almost sheepish. 

Briseis looked at her watch again and impatiently asked, “Do you have a question?” 

“I guess I don’t,” the man said. He gave her a half-smile as she gathered her papers and hurried out into the hall. 

“Waste of five minutes,” she muttered under her breath. 

The next week, she watched the man in her class walk oddly from table to table. He leaned against the wall about half an hour in, a thin sheen of sweat on his face. She furrowed her brow, and watched his strong, wide chest heave oddly. Suddenly, she realized what was happening, and caught him before he fell. Two nearby students noticed, and she shot them looks before they could say anything.

“Can you make it down the hall to my office?” she asked. In truth, she did not know the protocol for if a student became ill in her classroom.

“Mmm,” he said, nodding, and limped slowly out the door. She stood near him, as if to catch him if he lost balance. 

When he was seated in front of her desk, looking uncomfortable in more ways than one, she closed the door. 

“What the hell was that?” 

“Sorry, miss,” he mumbled. “Haven’t stood that long in a while.” 

Suddenly, it dawned on her, and she felt sick with guilt. He’d been trying to tell her before. “You’re a disabled vet.” 

He didn’t look at her. 

“Why didn’t you tell me? We could have made arrangements. You could have taken the exam alone, I could have put all the minerals on one table…” 

“I’m not really built for special treatment, ma’am,” he said almost diffidently. 

“All three of my brothers were drafted. My high school boyfriend, too,” she said, and against her better judgement, she took his hand. It was twice the size of hers, with slender, pretty fingers that would have looked feminine were they not so calloused. She guessed maybe he worked on one of the ranches outside of town on the weekends. 

She dipped her free hand under her blouse and pulled out three sets of dog tags on a beaded metal chain. “I feel the worst for my dad. Not a single son left.” 

He ran a thumb along her hand, then brought her knuckle up to his lips and kissed it like how chivalrous gentlemen did in old films. 

She felt herself swallow and her heart speed up. “After five, you can come back to the classroom and finish. I’ll move everything to one table for you,” she said, and she hoped she kept her voice level. “I must be getting back. You’re free to rest until then.”

_______________

Briseis did not speak to the man--Pat was his name--much for the rest of the semester. The fact that when she looked at him, she would swallow thickly as though choking on honey, was of no consequence.

She paired him with the prettiest female student in the class--a bouncy blonde with dimples and Monroe-esque curves--for a lab as if to prove to herself that he was like all the other chauvinistic men that came through her classroom. She’d watched the two like a hawk that day, telling herself that it was because the woman always needed extra attention. She chewed on the inside of her cheek as she watched him explain, gently but not condescendingly, to the woman what she had done wrong in her answers. She tried not to feel too pleased when the girl touched his hand and he pulled away.

When the bright Colorado sun filtered through the lecture hall’s east-facing window, hit his face, and made his eyes glow a devastating ochre, she’d try not to let her eyes rest on him for too long. 

The semester ended too soon, and every day the less logic-inclined part of her brain wanted to drag lectures on, add questions to the exams, anything to keep him in her classroom a few more minutes. 

On the final day of class, Pat approached her. “Thank you for teaching me,” he said. He was holding something in his hands. 

“What’s that?” she asked. The final dawdlers began clearing out of the room and they were alone. 

“It’s for you. You posted the final grades today so it’s not against the rules.” 

“The rules?” she repeated, slower than she’d ever been in her life. 

“Students can’t give professors gifts until the final grade has been posted,” he said, and she felt a rectangular box being pressed into her hands. “Otherwise a case can be made for bribery.” 

She took the lid off the small box and her breath caught. Inside was a long silver chain, thick enough to support some weight but still elegant. 

“It’s for your brothers’s dog tags. Those ugly metal chains don’t suit anyone and I--” he noticed her tears, then. “Did I overstep?” 

She threw her arms around him, quite without thinking. “It’s lovely,” she said, and felt his strong arms around her, reciprocating the embrace, after a moment. His scent was earthy and warm and she nearly breathed in deep. But she remembered herself quickly, and pulled away, trying to wipe her tears so her mascara would not smear.

She removed the chain from her neck and attempted to restring the dog tags on the new, beautiful chain, but her hands trembled. 

“Allow me, ma’am,” he said, and strung the tags easily. 

“That’s embarrassing,” she joked. 

“Nah. I’ve done this before. Spent four years doing it. I bet if I tried to teach geology on the spot, I wouldn’t be any good at it,” he said graciously. He took her hand, and pressed his lips to her knuckles once more, like he had that day in her office. “It was a pleasure.” 

He was nearly through the door when she heard herself say, “Wait.” 

He turned to look at her, and she did not know what more to say. “Would you like me to call you sometime?” he supplied after a few seconds of silence. 

She nodded, looking through her purse for her business card. When she found one, she pulled out a pen and wrote her home number on it.

_______________

Briseis had Pat over for dinner. He was polite, brought her flowers and did not drink too much wine with his meal and complimented everything in sight. Her roommates haunted the doorways, giggling at the two of them. She had told them, of course, that she liked him and was frustrated that he did not seem to be taking her hints that this was so. She lived to regret such a confession; she was teased mercilessly by them.

At the end of the evening, she walked him to his motorcycle where he’d parked it down the street. He took her hand, like he always did these days, to kiss it goodbye, and instead of ceding to this, she pulled him to her. She stood on the tips of her toes and reached up to kiss his mouth. 

He looked at her tenderly, almost sadly, and her first thought was _Oh no._

“You could do better,” he said, but he did not step away from her. She almost laughed. Better? Did there exist someone kinder in the world? Did he mean that he was poor, less educated? Was it the war, the things he’d seen? 

“I wouldn’t want to,” she said. He tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear.

“You say that now,” he answered, and to her surprise, he leaned in and kissed her forehead.

“I’ve never been turned down before,” she said, trying to make light of the situation rather than allowing the sting of rejection sink in. “Was dinner that bad?” 

“Briseis,” he said fondly, before putting his helmet on and zooming away. 

As she walked back to her home, she found herself searching for anger within her. There was none; Pat had turned her down so gently that it would be a crime to be angry at him. 

When she called him the next day, he sounded surprised. 

“I thought you’d be done with me,” he said over the line. It killed her. She wanted to hold him, reassure him, No, I could never be done with you, I love you. 

“Of course not, Pat. You’re my favorite person,” she admitted, twirling the phone’s cord in her fingers and leaning against the wall. 

“You’re mine,” he said back, and, despite the rejection from the night before, she found herself blushing. Maybe he’d change his mind one day. She wasn’t going anywhere.

_______________

“Got a letter from Skops,” Auto said during mess, tossing a photograph down on the table where Achilles and Odysseus were already seated.

Achilles tried to seem casual about picking it up. From the nervous way the two other men eyed him, though, it appeared that he was fooling no one. 

Patroclus stood in the photograph with three women. His hair was longer than they’d let him have it in the Navy, and Achilles felt his fingertips ache to touch it. He thought of running his nose along the back of his lovely neck, thought about his long arms, those hands…. 

His hands. He was holding hands with one of the women. She was the most beautiful of the three, a sensibly-dressed, small brunette with plump lips and long eyelashes. He hated her. His fist under the table clenched and unclenched, and he set the photograph down too slowly. 

“I’ve lost my appetite,” he said, standing.

_______________

**July 9th, 1974**

**Skops--**

**I got your letter. I’m glad school is working out so well for you. That girl in the picture, she got any sisters with low standards, too? I don’t know how an ugly fuck like you could score that.**

**I’m going to cut to the chase, here. I think you ought to write Leo. I don’t think anyone ever told you what happened after you got loaded into that helicopter. All I knew up until last week was that Leo got lost for about a day until Odysseus tracked him down. But Odysseus and me were in Da Nang a couple days ago and he was fucking hammered, man. I’ve never seen him so drunk. And he said to me something like, “Leo didn’t really get lost when we loaded Skops up. He went fucking crazy.” It took me a while to get anything else out of him, but Leo had torn apart some kid’s water buffalo with his bare fucking hands. I don’t know how you do that. That’s how he found him. There was a trail of blood and fucking buffalo guts leading up to him. Odysseus thinks he was eating it, too. I’m not telling you all this to be an asshole. It’s not like it’s your fault you got shot. I just think you should reach out to him.**

**He’s been really agitated since your letter. I think he had this weird idea in his head that you guys were going to be bachelors together forever. He was so weird about the picture. Just fucking write him, okay? He’s such an asshole now. Like, I love him and all, but he’s got a hairpin trigger these days. He even took a swing at Odysseus last week. Ody took it fine and laughed it off, but you know how hotheads are out in the bush. He’s likely to get himself hurt like this.**

**Auto**


	7. Being Known

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: There's an extremely brief mention of hate crimes against LGBT folks towards the end of this chapter.

Patroclus started living in a shitty little Airstream on his boss’s ranch in the fall of 1974. The insulation was poor and it was expensive to heat the space constantly, so he’d taken to bundling up and turning the heat on only when it got ten degrees or so below freezing outside. The situation wasn’t ideal, but it was rent-free so long as, in addition to his other duties, he managed the six square miles of land the cattle grazed on.

He had started writing Achilles after Auto’s letter. Short, factual letters like the one he’d sent Auto when he’d been in the hospital and fucking Hector. Achilles responded with short, factual letters of his own, which occasionally were bitingly mean and made Patroclus wonder if he was doing the wrong thing after all. 

In mid-November, the anniversary of Dios’s death was approaching, and immediately after that, it would be Clint’s. Only a year ago, Pat had held Achilles in his arms, kissed him, not known what horror was about to befall them. A year ago he’d had both his legs and fell asleep with the comfort of knowing that the end was soon. How evil, how unfair that it had been Dios and not him. How unfair that the only price he’d paid for Clint’s death was that of his calf. And how terrible that there was no one to talk to about it. 

He was a man of few words by nature; most cowboys were. Stoicism was bred into the folks who lived on the Front Range just the same as privation and lonesomeness. But he still felt like he owed Achilles better than a few lines he wrote out during class or after work, so in that little Airstream, wearing three coats, he thought about what he might say to Achilles. 

It was mid-morning when he heard Briseis’s car--no one else ever came out to see him--approach. They spent most days together now. In the summer, he couldn’t find any classes to take like he’d wanted and she offered to ask the administration if he could be her research assistant for a few credits. They’d agreed and the two spent the summer in the ski cabin of one of the wealthier professors. They had been as thick as thieves--sharing everything except a bed.

During that summer, he often found himself talking like he had in those early days with Achilles. He felt like the truth--he was a murderer, in love with a murderer, and queer or something adjacent to it--was water in his hands and every time he let his guard down, some of it slipped through his fingers. 

But he could not stop himself from sharing with Briseis. He was like a stray dog. He tried not to trust. He had been hurt before. But he wanted to trust so badly, so when a woman tentatively offered a palmful of food, he had nervously crept toward her with his head down and his tail between his legs and slowly allowed himself to be loved. Eventually, she no longer had to coax it out of him. He would come to heel when he heard her approach.

He wasn’t sure when it became apparent that he’d let his guard down almost completely. But it had certainly happened sometime before the day he’d driven his motorcycle up to the reservoir with Briseis hanging onto his back. She had packed a picnic and they’d found a nice, isolated beach at which to lunch. After they’d eaten and discussed what samples she needed to gather for her research, he’d taken off his shirt, and she saw, for the first time, the diagonal line of shrapnel that had clawed across his back. It occurred to him that not even Achilles had seen it. He turned and looked at her guiltily. 

“It’s okay if you want to swim,” she said, not acknowledging the scars. “I could stay here if you’re worried about--” 

He wasn’t sure what she was going to say. “I’m not worried about anything. Join me,” he said, stripping off his pants and taking off the prosthetic. 

Swimming was one of the few things he could do well, with or without the leg, and if he closed his eyes in the hot summer sun, he could imagine that he was swimming in the open ocean off the side of his ship, Achilles doing laps around him, tugging on his ankle from under the water, kissing him when they got so deep under that his ears hurt and the light was scarce. 

“You’re good,” Briseis said, catching up to where he was floating on his back thirty yards off the shore. The saltwater, the man he loved, and the pressure in his ears dissipated at the sound of her voice. 

“I’d have to be. I was in the Navy, after all,” he said. “It’s not as easy as it used to be if you’ll believe it.” He looked over at her with his lazy half-smile, and she looked back.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked, and he turned his head to look at the sky. 

_What the hell?_ he had thought. There he was, the stray dog, about to roll over and show his belly. “I used to hate the sky in Colorado. It’s so cloudless you could drown looking up. It was like that the day after the draft. It was miserably bright, and with the snow, it was blinding.” 

He looked over at her once more. Her dark eyes were serious, and she watched him with interest. And so he told her about Clint and that .44 Smith & Wesson. He had thought that the shame of it would rise to the surface in his telling, but he laid out the facts like a lawyer presenting a case. He had gone over that day so many times--if he’d taken a different route, if he’d laid in bed a little longer, if a butterfly had flapped its wings in the Amazon… 

He turned to look back at the clear sky when the story was over. “It’s funny: my dad told me that he wanted my legs blown up and guts rearranged. I suppose he’d be disappointed with only getting a third of his wish.” 

“He’s a bastard,” she said, and he heard the tears in her voice. It surprised him, and he realized that he hadn’t expected her to take his side. He bit back the last of what he was going to say, which was, _but it still wouldn’t be enough if he’d gotten his way_. 

She was sobbing, then, and he found himself pulling her slight frame to his chest and swimming back to shore. She curled around him, her face on the crook of his neck, and it gave him goosebumps to be touched there. 

He’d been hard, holding her against him like that, and he thought about what making love to her might be like. It would be gentle, probably, and slow and they’d come together and only once. It wouldn’t be like how it’d been with Achilles, where they were always frantic and needy, sinking teeth and claws into each other and needing more, more, more. 

He thought, if she had reached up to kiss him, he might have taken off her one-piece and had her right there on the beach. But she had not tried to kiss him since that day he’d had dinner at her house, and he pulled away from her embrace and put on his shirt and his cock went flaccid after a while.

“Helen moved out of her room today,” Briseis said as she entered the silver bullet. It was a particularly cold morning and only marginally warmer inside, and she wrapped her arms around herself. “You really ought to move in. We’ve got all kinds of luxuries--heat and electricity, for example,” she said, looking meaningfully at her surroundings. She’d made it no secret that she found his living situation to be beneath him. Beneath anyone, really. 

“You got any of that highfalutin indoor plumbing?” he responded, laying the hick twang in his accent on thick. 

“Cute,” she said. “But I worry about you out here.” 

“Can’t afford the $36 you landlord charges for a room,” he said, allowing himself to be fussed over by her as she dragged him to her car. 

“Can you afford to lose a toe to frostbite in that tin can?” she shot back, turning the key in the ignition. They jerked painfully along the dirt road on the ranch--cars are meant for cities. You understood why farmers and cowboys only drive trucks after having to suffer through a couple of miles of prairie scraping the bottom of your sedan--and Carole King’s “It’s Too Late” played on the radio. The song only served to remind Patroclus of Achilles, and he tried to slump down into the seat. 

Their first errand was the post office, where Pat would look through his bills and correspondence from his Navy buddies, and Briseis would buy stamps. Their second errand was to the grocery store, their third was to the library. They did not make it past the post office that day. 

Patroclus had gotten a letter from a Sheriff Saint-Yves, Clint’s father. It was general-delivery; no one had his address. He was surprised anyone knew he was alive, let alone the area he’d ended up in. 

“Are you alright? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Briseis said as she stepped back into the vestibule where the PO boxes were before the seriousness of his mood became apparent. She snatched the envelope from his hand, and he let her. 

“I’m going to open and read this. Is that okay?” Briseis asked, and Patroclus nodded, leaning against the wall, looking ill. 

“Do you want anything your father had?” she asked. 

“No. Maybe. I’d like to know my mother’s name.” 

Briseis looked at him hard. “Noted.” 

“So he’s dead, then?” 

“Yes, your father is dead.” 

“Huh,” he said, and for some stupid reason, he was brought back to the time he’d been stabbed. _You’re bleeding,_ Achilles had said. Did he know anything else to say to bad news? Huh, I guess, I guess, huh. Half-smile, hick accent, I guess. 

“Looks like your father never properly disowned you. You inherited his property.” 

“I don’t think I can go up there,” he said. “Not much I can’t make myself get through, but going up to Opus City is one of ‘em.” 

He did not say what he was thinking, which was, “He probably figured I’d eat it before he did.” 

“I can go,” Briseis said, and her voice was gentler than he’d ever heard it. It reminded him a little of the way he’d talk to cows who were calving at the ranch when he knew they were in pain and there was nothing he could do about it. And Patroclus could see, through the back of the letter, that she’d left out quite a bit. He wondered what insults the sheriff had thrown his way. “I can say I’m your wife. Settle your father’s affairs up there.” 

Patroclus, who wouldn’t accept a favor under even the most dire of circumstances, said, “You might have to.” 

So she did, and didn’t tell him any of the things they said about him when she returned, and he got some money from selling the house and was able to afford that $36 a month after all.

_______________

**November 14th, 1974**

**Achilles,**

**It’s coming up on a year since everything went to hell. It’s funny. I don’t know the day we first kissed, or the day I told you I loved you. But I sure as hell remember the day it fell apart.**

**There’s this group of vets that meets on campus once a week. I don’t go, but some guy from the army I had a class with was always bugging me about it so I went to one meeting just to get him to stop bringing it up. I was right in thinking I wouldn’t like it. Everyone had to go around and share something, and when it was my turn, all I could come up with was, “This coffee is awful.” But they kept trying to get me to share my feelings like my feelings wouldn’t get me a tire iron to the face, realistically. That’s what they do to faggots out here. I know things are different where you’re from on the coast, but the fact is, I’m not on the coast, and I’ve got to be careful.**

**But they did say something in that meeting that was worth the shit coffee and uncomfortable prodding. One guy said, “You can’t judge something that happened in ‘Nam by the standards we’ve got here in society.” Maybe that’s what I’d been doing. Truth is, I’ve been looking for any excuse to forgive you since maybe a week after the fact. When I took that bullet, and I thought I was dying (stupid, it’s not like I got hit anywhere important), all I could think about was how much time I’d wasted being mad at you.**

**And now I’m worried that what we were won’t ever happen again. There’s too much distance, too much stuff I didn’t say but should have, and I’m too much of a coward to do anything about it except think about fucking tire irons and rewrite this goddamn letter over and over until it reads all wrong and I crumble it up and throw it out.**

**But the way things are going, with me not saying anything of importance and sending a postcard now and then isn’t fucking working. I wake up, I think of you. I ride to class, I think of you. I work on the ranch, I think of you. I found out my dad died the other day and I fucking thought of you. If I weren’t so fucking good at being miserable, I’d have written all this out a long time ago. I used to tell myself that suffering was just a part of living. But I didn’t suffer a single day when we were together. Changed my whole worldview, that life is something that can be enjoyed instead of something you just had to bear.**

**I like your letters. Even the mean ones. My favorite was the one you sent that said, “Who would have guessed you’re shit at having a conversation on paper, too?” and nothing else. You didn’t even sign your name. Do you remember? It really made me laugh. I know you were trying to hurt my feelings, but to insult me that accurately, you have to know me first, and being known by you, Achilles, is an awfully good feeling.**

**I think, if the war ever ends, I’d like to be known some more by you.**

**Patroclus**


	8. Survival Ennui

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the long wait. In truth, I've had most of this written for a very long time and just kept second-guessing myself and thinking I needed more substance. 
> 
> I wrote 3,000 words about Antilochus in this chapter before it sunk in that I could just write, "He’d been fucking a Cherry from the army," and it would have the same effect on the plot. 
> 
> Also, in all likelihood, the next chapter will be the last one with two alternate endings in keeping with the "Wishbone," theme, ie: the themes of duality and things splitting in half. This time you get to choose. 
> 
> I've been working on a Wild West AU and a Dark Academia AU for this pairing. Let me know which you guys would like me to polish up and post first.

Odysseus did not make it a secret that he did not like Leo. He did not make it a secret, that is, until he caught Leo in the jungle with viscera and bone dangling from his snarling maw, half-naked, eyes darting around like a wild animal. You see something like that and think, Okay, it’s probably best to stay on this lunatic’s good side and keep this in my pocket, considering he ripped a goddamn cow in half and didn’t break a sweat.

So on Leo’s good side Odysseus found himself. Odysseus was a cockroach by nature, and he wasn’t fucking shy about it either. Frankly, he was half-surprised that Leo didn’t call him out at once about the sudden turn-around until he remembered that the only person who ever bothered pointing out the obvious to this guy was the whole reason that Leo went nuts in the first fucking place. 

Odysseus had never seen anything like that in his life. His marriage to Penelope back home was solid as a fucking rock. They were best friends, and he loved her, and when he’d gotten wounded last year (nothing serious, he got a fuckload of stitches and they sent him back on his way), he’d written Penny and told her about the long, pink scar on his right leg. She’d written back, “I don’t mind the infidelity, darling, but if your leg is now as ugly as your face, I’m afraid we’ll have to divorce.” It had been funny, of course, but the kicker was that she’d written it on a postcard, so everyone in the whole outfit read it before he’d bothered to get up for mail call. Moments like that made him feel as though he’d met his match. Who else could know him so completely, lay him bare like that, and be so fucking funny about it? And still, he would never go mad for her. And she would certainly not take a bullet for him. It took an exceptional kind of stupid, he thought, to love like that. 

And Leo was. Exceptionally stupid, that is. He didn’t seem to comprehend that when Odysseus found the bastard and covered for him, it wasn’t out of the goodness of his heart. In essence, Odysseus owned Leo now, and when Leo had gotten hot under the collar a few months ago and bopped him one, Odysseus had laughed. Would a lion tamer begrudge a lion for tearing up the chair? That’s a risk you take getting into the business.

And it wasn’t like he was planning to use the fact that he was queer against him. Odysseus told himself it was because that’d be below the belt, even for him, but the truth of the matter was that it was too hard to prove and everyone and their mother liked Skops just because he was easy-going and handsome and didn’t seem to realize it, and slandering a guy who took a bullet for another sailor was pretty much social suicide. 

He’d been laying out things way ahead of time, in case the occasion came that he’d have to get Leo to do something for him. He’d feigned drunkenness, let it “slip” that Leo had not really been lost that day to Auto. And the kid whose water buffalo had been killed had not been hard to locate. Turns out, not too many blond men came around to rip your fucking livestock in half. 

Odysseus owned Leo. And he chose to keep it in his pocket for a while.

_______________

Achilles had volunteered to be a diver sometime in early August 1974. It was a dangerous job--mostly marine salvaging, and guys who’d been divers for a while had Meniere’s or else got horribly injured. But Achilles thought he was impervious to disease and impossible to hurt. He passed the physical portion of the exam with flying colors, and the extra $65 to his income was nothing to sneeze at. 

So he found himself stateside at the diving school in Florida in September, getting eaten alive by mosquitos and wondering what the Spaniards ever saw in this swamp, anyway. They had let him know that they’d fly him to Washington--or anywhere in the US--when he’d completed the 70-day program for R&R and he almost wanted to say, “Send me to Colorado.” 

Part of him--the worst part, the part that was dramatic and cruel and sadomasochistic--wanted to show up at Patroclus’s door unannounced, brush past Pat and poke around his things. 

“Who’s this you’re dating now?” he’d ask, razor blades in his eyes and ice in his voice, his betrayal evident. “Thanks for the fucking postcards. Like I care what the weather’s like in your shitty cowtown.” 

But that’s not how it’d go, and Achilles knew it. Patroclus wasn’t some Cherry Achilles could push around. In fact, Patroclus had a special talent for making anyone who tried to bully him feel like the smallest person alive. It was an alternative to fighting that felt worse than getting hit, somehow. 

What would probably happen is that Achilles would show up, having worked himself up all throughout the flight, ready to give Pat a piece of his mind, and Pat would swing the door open and Achilles would lose all momentum and stand there like a gaping fish. He’d be stuck there for five days, too. That’s something he hadn’t considered, in his agitated fantasies. He’d show up, throw a tantrum, and then what? Sit there in that cowtown, embarrassed about flying halfway around the world just to yell at his ex, and stew on his impulsivity and idiocy among a bunch of stinking barnyard animals? 

Then, there was an alternative possibility. Patroclus opening the door, Achilles not bothering with words. Crushing mouths together, the scent of Barbasol and earth lingering in the air before the stench of sweat and semen overpowered it. Achilles, running his fingers over the shrapnel marking Pat’s strong back, familiarizing himself with his new skin, his new gait, his new nightmares. Patroclus saying, _Maybe we shouldn’t,_ and Achilles replying, _I came all this way, baby. You’re not gonna turn me away, are you?_

“Yeah, just fly me into SeaTac,” he’d said before he could talk himself into taking the flight to Denver International Airport. 

_Impermanence_ , he thought, as his plane flew across the country in the night, towns lit up below. Just five days, and then he’d have to catch another plane back to Hawaii. Nothing lasted for long. Nothing was immutable. Everyone around him was going to die, did they know that? Why was everyone acting so fucking calm all the time? People stood in line to board the plane like lambs to a slaughter. Watching men in business suits complain to the help desk and tired moms with shaking hands struggle to light their cigarettes as their ugly fucking children ran around them--it was maddening. He wanted to grab them by the lapels of their shirts and articulate this strange, Damoclean desperation he felt. But words fell short when he tried to make sense of his dread and panic even to himself.

Being alive, he thought, was like watching an asteroid hurtling towards Earth and no one doing a goddamn thing about it. Everyone saw that the collision--death--was near but they kept paying their bills and filing their taxes and fucking their wives like everything was fine. And, given that everyone meets the same ending, what was to stop him from driving his father’s car off the road and straight into the Puget Sound and just being done with this whole miserable affair once and for all? What kind of fucking deal was this? No matter how good things went for him, the best-case scenario would be suburban clapboard with a six-figure income and an unhappy wife (deservedly--he had no illusions about just how terrible of a husband he’d be) eating barbiturates like candy, until finally, mercifully, dying in a bed in front of his weeping family, shitting himself and aching in old age. He didn’t want to age another day; he wanted immortality. He didn’t want to age another day; he wanted to die. 

Everywhere he went, he felt claustrophobic. He slept little, ate little. He’d been fucking a Cherry from the army who he knew was straight and only pretending to enjoy himself during sex because he worshipped the ground Achilles walked on and, clearly, did not want to disappoint him. For the first time, he understood those hippies who proclaimed that the end was nigh, the people who dropped acid, the religions that sprouted up and died in a month. Weren’t they all just throwing darts at a wall and seeing what stuck? 

His outbursts got increasingly violent, and--masochist that he was--when he felt himself winding down, he remembered Patroclus’s hand on his cheek, _That’s enough, Achilles._ The memory hurt enough that he’d get his second wind. No one could stop his rage. No one knew the bounds of his apathy. 

“My dad got on the phone with me last night and talked my ear off about Watergate, all ‘I can’t believe it, I’m shocked,’” Auto had said, when Achilles had expressed about a tenth of what he’d been thinking about just before they sent him to diving school. “I was staring at my boots the whole time, thinking about the brains and guts and blood that I’ve probably stepped on, and my old man wants me to think about Richard fucking Nixon? So I think that’s the general consensus around here, man. Nothing fucking matters and the people in charge are idiots.” 

It hadn’t been what Achilles had wanted to hear, but it had been the truth. The mood had shifted tremendously, a sense of foreboding settling in on everyone. This war had gone on too long; they were going to lose any second. Every time they got Cherries in--fewer and fewer each time--it felt like a strange, ironic joke, like why did they sterilize the needles for lethal injections? Why do humans participate in acts of futility? Why do they keep sending these fucking kids out here when it feels like we’re about to pack up any day now and the only thing these Cherries know how to do well is get themselves killed? Still, they were deployed, given orders, told to keep going.

_______________

“I saved all the mail you got when you were gone,” Auto said during breakfast. A more observant person would notice something off in his tone, but Achilles did not. 

“Oh?” he asked, distractedly, playing with his food like an antsy child. Powdered milk, powdered eggs. He had been surprised when he got to Florida and ordered breakfast at an IHOP that real eggs tasted wrong to him now. He noticed, too, how technical military terms colored his everyday speech. “Bed” became “rack,” “floor” became “deck.” Was his brain permanently rewired? 

It took him some time to realize that Auto had set down a bundle of envelopes bound together with a rubber band. Auto was regarding him very carefully, and Achilles finally unbound the envelopes to flip through them. 

His breath hitched at the familiar handwriting, the Colorado return address. He looked up at Auto, his mouth open. His hands shook as he tore the envelope. And he read. 

It was then, with the letter in his hands, that he understood the truth of the matter: Patroclus loved him more than he loved Patroclus because Patroclus was capable of loving so fiercely that it exceeded words and metrics and any convention. Did his heart stack up in comparison? Was this what it felt like to be inferior? 

And he could have been there, just last week. He could have taken that flight to DIA and taken a car out to the cowtown—no longer shitty and stupid in his mind, but gloriously open and void of any people (how often had he prayed for just such a thing, a world with only the two of them?), _Home, Home on the Range,_ have you ever seen fields so golden? A sky so blue?—and been welcomed into those arms that felt like home.

**Author's Note:**

> Footnotes for Chapter 1, Cherries: 
> 
> 1\. I imagine Phthia, Washington to be on the coast, maybe Ocean Shores area? It doesn't matter, because as a politician, Peleus would have to move to Olympia, Washington.  
> 2\. I imagine that Pat lived in northwestern Colorado. I envision Opus City as, like, a wild west town that kept existing after the wild west was over.  
> 3\. Olongapo is a city in the Phillippines where there was once a Naval base (now defunct).  
> 4\. 'Stronger than dirt' was the slogan of Ajax dish soap.  
> 5\. I called Achilles "Leo" because of how his name is pronounced in the ancient Greek, Ah-He-Lay-Ohs.


End file.
